The Startups We Use to Build Our Startup
(And Some Free Resources To Help You Build Yours)
When every single second counts, the tools that give you those seconds back are absolutely priceless.
There are tons of tools that we use to get those seconds back, and we put them directly in to building our product.
We use a lot of startups to power our startup, they help us be more efficient and move the needle forward while building Spectafy. The tools we use range from design and development to simple task management and communication.
We love transparency, and we want everyone in our community to move as fast as they can, so we want to show you where our efficiency comes from, and empower you to move more freely, and build faster.
Here’s a tally of the products we use while building!
Task and project management:
First on our list is task and project management, because every good team needs a to-do list to run off of, and a quick at-a-glance understanding of what needs to be done next.
Trello was and is our solution for task management early on. Trello is free and helpful, it can get a lot more advanced with their paid version, but we simply use the free version to keep our priorities in order.
Basecamp for project management once graduated from email and Trello. Basecamp is arguably the best tool to manage a lean team of designers, developers, and marketers with an at-a-glance digest of what’s going on in a day. As well as being able to get a digest of information about your projects at any time, Basecamp also succeeds at really wrapping together discussions in a powerful way, to keep everything in-line, and help log discussions for future reference. We use this tool every day, and it truly is our home-base on the web.
Design and development:
Of course no startup’s tool-belt is worth its weight if it doesn’t include some lean design and development tools to empower its hackers, ours is no exception.
Marvel App for mobile prototype generation. Every startup building a mobile app needs to have a prototype generator to run mocks off of, to see and feel their app intuitively on the platform they’re building for, and iterate their designs on-the-fly, Marvel helps us do this.
Sketch for quick and lightweight design. Sketch is just so flexible and fast that it was obligatory for us to ditch Photoshop, this truly is the design tool for the modern era.
Xamarin for development. This is the main mobile technology we’re using, developed by the startup Xamarin. It allows us to develop for multiple platforms (Android, iOS, and more) easier through sharing the core logic code of the app, enabling us to essentially build for every platform simultaneously. Even Rdio’s beautiful apps are built using Xamarin, and share over 50,000 lines of code throughout all of their platforms.
TestFairy for pushing versions of our Android mobile app out among the team, and also now to early beta testers. This is a quick, simple, and effective way of gauging the response from your early beta of your app, as well as iterating quickly with your team.
Github to organize, push, and track our code, this is a given, we wouldn’t be alive without it.
Parse for a quick jumpstart in our mobile app development. Parse is a mobile backend as a service (mBAAS) startup, allowing us to move much faster with a lot of the core backend work already done, such as analytics, push notifications, and it works (pretty) well with Xamarin.
Sublime text editor, our text editor of choice for us lightweight web guys. Sublime Text is a super simple text editor for simple front end web design & development.
Raygun.io is super handy for finding and tracking bugs in our development, and making quick fixes on the fly.
NewRelic for server side analytics in Node.JS, this helps us keep track of our very important data from our user’s interactions.
Keen IO for custom analytics in our mobile and web app. Custom event tracking and reporting.
Community and marketing:
Peek from UserTesting for well, user-testing. It’s free, and if you spot a bug or help them out they will give you a full (~$50) user test for free! It’s an easy way to see where people might be trailing off on your site, and how you can iterate your marketing site to get more conversions and more sign-ups. See our post on Copyblogger to see a bit more about how we increased our conversion rates on our marketing site by over 600% in a few steps.
Usability Hub for testing new mock ups on our marketing site before they go live to see which converts better into more sign-ups, and if we should be changing more before going live.
Medium for content promotion and a rich place to connect with users that are bustling in the tech community, and namely in our target location demographic in San Francisco (our launch city). We’ve had posts get over 3,000 views in a day, quickly helping us build our early access list, namely this one about visual information, and how we use it.
GatherContent is poised for agencies specifically, but we use it as our content calendar and collaboration system. GatherContent (which I’m literally writing on right now) is a great platform to quickly discuss the content you’re looking to put out, where you want it to go, schedule the “due date” in the calendar, and check off the posts that are either pending, approved, or live. It’s a great “base of operations” for content, helping us be far more organized with our written marketing efforts.
The generic social profiles: StumbleUpon, reddit, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ for connecting with our community. These are all great avenues to push our content, and see how it gets shared, then iterate based off of that. We also promote in relevant sub-reddits which have given us some un-paralleled, no-bullshit responses about our app and market.
Buffer for making social media account management and analytics a dream! Seriously, being able to schedule posts on all of our social media accounts at the click of one button is just convenience at its finest. We are constantly searching for productivity tips and tricks as well, and we love to share them, so when we come across them on the web (Buffer themselves have quite a few) it’s incredibly easy to simply add them to our “buffer” to share at pre-scheduled times during the day.
MailChimp for building an email list and staying connected with our followers. We love how simple MailChimp is, how quick it is to set up, and the breadth of their free accounts. You don’t even need to pay for a subscription until you cap out your 2000 subscribers on your free account. This is the best bootstrapping email tool for startups, and just so happens to be the best email tool on the market once you need more power behind your mail. It’s the best of both worlds.
Mandrill (by MailChimp) for sending transactional emails (as opposed to newsletter blasts with MailChimp). This tool just makes transactional emails a breeze, simple as that.
We would also be amiss to not mention all of the “beta sites” and early release sites out there to help you get the word out, betali.st chief among them. This landing page on BetaList literally gave us more sign-ups to our early access beta than any other page or any other referrer we’ve had to date. With traffic coming from this page on average converting more than 25% more often than other referrers (see more on this in that same post from Copyblogger).
We’ve also put together a list of ~100 sites that you can submit your startup to, we went through some real threading to nail these down, but these are some of our favorites to try to submit to. These have been invaluable for us when building our early access beta list.
Misc stuff:
There are always the odds and ends of tools, things that aren’t directly involved with development, design, or marketing, but are a bit more intangible, but no less essential. Here are some of the intangibles we use.
GroupMe for connecting people, and open, quick communication over mobile with a group. We use this for our specific needs of testing some of our hypotheses about our app. In a way, GroupMe has been able to act like an early prototype of our Spectafy app. GroupMe is a good place to encourage people to find an existing tool that is similar to what you want to build, and re-purpose it to act as your early prototype to let you test your hypotheses faster! #leanstartup
DocuSign for all of those pesky legal shenanigans (just kidding, they’re seriously important). Sign and send documents with simple eSignatures.
Wrapping it up
We love using the startups we use to build Spectafy almost as much as we love building Spectafy itself. The tools really do craft the worker, we are only as efficient as we allow ourselves to be.
Every second (and dollar!) counts when building a startup, so seriously think about how you could be taking advantage of tools that could free up your time to build better products.
If you have any other suggestions that we didn’t mention, or even competitors to some of the products we use that you like more, let us know, we’re always growing!
If this helped you in any way, it would really mean a lot to us if you would “recommend” it, and share it with others!
